Does the RBI Mean Anything?

Miguel Cabrera is the AL MVP, despite the myriad cases made for his chief rival for the award, Mike Trout, by baseball fans whose preferred stats go beyond the triple-crown ones in which Cabrera led the league (batting average, home runs, runs batted in). But Cabrera’s win nonetheless contains elements of hope for those who prefer their Most Valuable Players chosen by more comprehensive metrics, such as wins above replacement. Here’s what it suggests: It may take a Triple Crown and a playoff appearance for an MVP candidate to beat out a rival who is otherwise more qualified for the award.

Of all the Triple Crown categories, Cabrera’s biggest lead came in RBI – he had 139 to Trout’s 83. That edge of 56 was hard to surmount. Of the 161 position players who have won an MVP since the award debuted 101 years ago, just 34 won while another top-10 finisher in the voting had a lead over the winner of 30 RBI or more. Of those 34, all but two either played on a playoff team, played one of the marquee defensive positions (second base, shortstop or catcher), or both. The two exceptions, Albert Pujols in 2008 and Jake Daubert in 1913, had big edges in batting average. Daubert, the 1913 NL batting champ, was nonetheless an odd choice in the third year of the award, and Pujols’s closest rival, Ryan Howard, hit more than 100 points lower than he did. And just 12 of the 161 position players got the award despite trailing another top-10 MVP candidate by 56 RBI or more.

Meanwhile, 65 of the 161 position players to win the MVP award led the league, or at least all the top-10 vote getters in their leagues, in RBI. And in 54 of the 102 years in which the award has been handed out, at least one of the winners was the RBI champ among viable MVP candidates — including 32 of 42 years between 1948 and 1989.

But lately, RBI haven’t been king in MVP voting. Since 1999, 25 position players have won the MVP award. Just four of them have led the top-10 vote-getters in their league in RBI — two fewer than the number who trailed at least one other top candidate by 30 RBI or more. Cabrera managed to buck the trend, but even with his Triple Crown and playoff appearance compared to the Angels’ third-place finish among four teams in their division, it was a fairly close vote. If just nine of the 21 voters who had Cabrera first and Trout second on their ballots had reversed their votes, Trout would be MVP, and the RBI would have lost much of its remaining luster.

Why shouldn’t RBI count much toward the MVP vote? Because they’re so dependent on context and opportunities — in short, factors players don’t control. Cabrera batted with 444 teammates on base this season, compared to 306 for Trout. Cabrera did drive in 22%, to 18% for Trout, but Cabrera also ground into double plays 19% of the time that he came to bat with a double-play opportunity, to 8% for Trout. So while Cabrera drove in more runners, he also left fewer of the ones he didn’t drive in for teammates to have the chance to bat home.

The other major awards weren’t quite as contentious. Every winner was either the league leader among eligible candidates in WAR according to Baseball Reference, or within one win above replacement of the leader. There was one seeming oddity, though: The fifth-place finisher in each league’s Cy Young Award voting was a closer, though closers pitch about a quarter the number of innings of starters and therefore rarely are as important to their teams as the best starters are. But these votes are understandable for two reasons. First, the Cy Young Award isn’t supposed to go necessarily to the most valuable pitchers in each league — just to the best ones. And second, these two relievers, Tampa Bay’s Fernando Rodney and Atlanta’s Craig Kimbrel, really did have seasons for the ages.

Rodney yielded just five earned runs in 74.2 innings. That was good for the lowest ERA since 1901 for a pitcher with at least 55 innings, as well as the best ERA relative to league average, known as ERA+. Kimbrel wasn’t far behind, with the eighth lowest ERA among pitchers with at least 55 innings and sixth best ERA+. Remarkably, though, Kimbrel may have been even better than those stats suggest. His fielding-independent pitching — which focuses on stats he has the most control over, such as strikeouts, walks and home runs — was 0.78, meaning his ERA would have been even lower with a bit more luck or better spacing of baserunners. (Rodney’s was 2.13, which is good but hardly historically great.) Kimbrel’s FIP was the lowest single-season figure for a reliever as far back as FanGraphs has kept the stat. So Rodney and Kimbrel may have gotten some of their votes for their gaudy saves totals — 90 combined — but other stats suggest they deserved those votes for outstanding performance.

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